It was a week of seismic change for health care in Scranton and Lackawanna County. Community Medical Center announced it was being purchased by Geisinger Health Systems and Moses Taylor Hospital revealed that it was being acquired by Tennessee-based Community Health Systems, which already is in the process of buying Scranton’s third remaining hospital, Mercy.

Conventional wisdom holds that Scranton is overserved by too many hospitals — that its diminished population doesn’t need and can’t support three independent facilities all offering competing (and essentially duplicated) services. It will be interesting to see how this week’s developments pan out, especially regarding Mercy and MTH.

So it turns out that the traditional, dead-tree press still has the power to bring down a national government. Sure, it first must embroil that government in a seedy criminal enterprise, but hey — newspapering will take relevancy where it finds it.

I kid, of course. Still, the unfolding hacking scandal involving Rupert Murdoch’s News International newspapers and British Prime Minister David Cameron’s administration has been shocking in its scope. Cameron’s feet are rightfully being held to the fire over his easy-terms appointment of Andy Coulson as his Communications Director. Coulson’s a former editor of the now-defunct tabloid News of the World, a Murdoch property that’s ground zero for allegations of phone and voicemail hacks targeting celebrities, Labour party pols, 9/11 victims and a 13-year-old murder victim.

Space Shuttle Atlantis returned home this morning, ending both its 13-day mission and the United States’ nearly five decades of preeminence in space exploration. Fiscally strapped and politically addled, the U.S. can only watch as other countries and the private sector take the lead.

Gay couples tying the knot in New York will find that the specific rights granted by that marriage end south of the Pennsylvania state line, thanks to the commonwealth’s so-called “Defense of Marriage” law.

That aside, there’s a certain oddity to U.S. Justice Department’s nascent investigation into the phone- and voicemail-hacking scandal that’s consuming Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. I wonder if the DOJ will pull personnel off their own domestic snooping programs for the job.